The boy’s question was straightforward. “Why did He create me?’ He was barely old enough to consider the question, but it was already present within him.
Another boy from a half a world away had a similar question. “Why am I the way I am?” Another adolescent girl wanted to know why evil things kept happening. Yet another young person came to see us and wanted an answer to this one, “Why did my mother not come back?” The sense of abandonment and some coupled ideas that it was her fault was hers was crippling her life.
Awkward and painful events are not the only cause of these troubled hearts. We have seen compliant and superficially successful young people with the same questions.
The imprint upon us from the Creator makes us unable to shake the questions unless they are buried in activity and life’s dramas that drown them out. When that does not work, then some sort of pleasure, however temporary or dangerous, is often sought to keep them away. Answers taught in most educational institutions don’t help when they adhere to evolutionary or naturalistic fundamentals. That just codifies man’s best attempt to deal with who they are (our origins) through some version of the Big Bang. It’s too rude to tell a child they came from morons, who came from pond scum, who came from star dust through a mysterious unsubstantiated process.
It is in this culture that we teach and live a biblical world view. The answers to the questions we hear are found in Jesus Christ. His imprint is upon us from the beginning (Genesis 1:26). We were made to walk with Him and have fellowship with Him, which is also established from the beginning as stated in the Bible. Human kind’s wayward ways cannot be remedied without a relationship with the One who gave us His image. It is the same solution for young people as it is the old. The one who seems good to the one who seems so bad have the same need: to find the only One who is truly good.
So, Paul is pretty straightforward while talking to the Athenians in Acts 17. He states that God gives us life and breath, knows our placement in time and location, and waits for us to reach to Him, if we dare to believe His way might be better than our own. History speaks loudly: our way without Him is a mess.
The call to know Him has not changed. The yearning of souls has not changed. He uses people and circumstances to get our attention, but it’s hard to see past the barriers of sin, pride, and riches. Nevertheless, the biblical view has not changed: He created, we rebelled (every last one of us), He provides a solution through His Son, and the Pearl of Great Price awaits for those who seek to find Him.
